Just to prove how serious they are about their commitment to retro soul, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings recorded I Learned the Hard Way using an eight-track Ampex tape machine, the kind their heroes and heroines in Memphis and Muscle Shoals might have employed back in the day. Whether the antique equipment gave them a warmer, more natural sound than they would have gotten with Pro Tools is debatable, but there’s no denying that that warmth and naturalness saturates these dozen tracks.

Unlike some of the other revivalists in the game, Jones is the real deal; she’s been at it for decades, the only thing separating her — and her note-perfect Dap-Kings — from the Hall of Famers being fame. Their fourth album isn’t substantially different from their first three: Jones’s delivery, alternately muscular and tender, and the band’s total empathy with the genre’s rules elevate each tune to lost-classic status.

Yet unlike so much of their competition within their chosen subgenre, they never leave the impression that they’re trying to recapture past glory. This music just feels right on them, and in its own way contemporary.

Ghost stories For all of the excitement that surrounded Wilco on the Maine State Pier or Sufjan Stevens at Port City Music Hall or the various sold-out Ray LaMontagne shows of the past year, there is no question that last Sunday's Phish show at the Cumberland County Civic Center was the biggest thing to hit our fair city in a very long time.

Winged migration Since their start in the middle of the decade, Brown Bird have been one of the region's go-to chamber-folk outfits, with a couple of dark and stormy albums earning them a following in various nooks of New England. The release of their latest album, The Devil Dancing , feels like both an ending and a new beginning.

Injustice for all Scott Sturgeon loses his train of thought a couple of times during this interview. He's loopy from jet lag — which is unavoidable after a 20-hour flight from New Zealand (halfway around the planet from his non-residency at a squatted apartment building in New York City), where he's just finished a tour with his claim-to-fame band, Leftover Crack.

Wanting more After its triumphant traversal of the complete Béla Bartók string quartets at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Borromeo Quartet was back for a free 20th- and 21st-century program at Jordan Hall, leading off with an accomplished recent piece by the 24-year-old Egyptian composer Mohammed Fairuz, Lamentation and Satire.

Group hug Things aren’t always what they’re called — we know that flying fish don’t fly and starfish aren’t even fish.

Local heroes, ’09 edition The Rhode Island music community flourished in 2009, with new full-lengths from the Coming Weak, California Smile, and the pride of Cranston West and official big-leaguers Monty Are I, who released Break Through the Silence in September.

Local flavor Local journalist and acclaimed hip-hop scribe Andrew Martin has corralled a flavorful roster of Rhody-based rap talent on the Ocean State Sampler , 10 exclusive tracks available for free download.

Beyond Dilla and Dipset With a semi-sober face I'll claim that hip-hop in 2010 might deliver more than just posthumous Dilla discs, Dipset mixtapes, and a new ignoramus coke rapper whom critics pretend rhymes in triple-entendres.

John Harbison plus 10 Classical music in Boston is so rich, having to pick 10 special events for this winter preview is more like one-tenth of the performances I'm actually looking forward to.

Shout it out! Sharks Come Cruisin' founder Mark Lambert is a Warwick native with a penchant for reworking and penning sea shanties from centuries past, often revised with rollicking punk flare — all thanks to the golden pipes of Quint, the shark-obsessed skipper in Jaws .

NEW YORK DOLLS | DANCING BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS | March 17, 2011 The new New York Dolls have now been around longer - and released more albums (three) - than the old New York Dolls, and they're commemorating that new longevity by letting go of any compulsion they may have still harbored to honor their designation as "punk-rock progenitors."

BRYAN FERRY | OLYMPIA | October 19, 2010 From the Kate Moss cover pic to the A-list of guest stars to the reunion with original Roxy Music members Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, and Andy Mackay, Olympia screams, "EVENT!"

OLD 97'S | THE GRAND THEATRE | October 12, 2010 When Old 97's are on — which they are most of the time on their eighth studio album — they're very, very on.